December 13th, 2011
The Vital Hack

These Iowa Caucuses create a seismic shift in the presidential nominating contests. Obama catapulted to the top of the Democrats’ dance card when he captured 38 percent of Iowa voters in 2008, and then swept to victory at the Democratic Convention eight months later. Without such a strong initial showing in Iowa, Obama might not have been able to steamroll through subsequent state primaries to win the presidency.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: This is the writing of the Vital Hack, the hack who’s read Hunter Thompson. The Vital Hack is Now; he’s Nervy; he’s Out There. Step aside, little lady. Coming through.

Yet why – given his supercharged metaphors – does his writing fail to achieve lift? Why, with all the weaponry (seismic catapults and steamrollers), the flaccidity? Why is this man failing to steamroll the Schoolmarm?

The Schoolmarm is more than happy to be steamrolled. But she finds men who try too hard a turn-off. In trying to get SOS going, this writer has simply ransacked his arsenal – which turns out to be everyone’s arsenal – and dumped all the weapons onto the page. As they clatter about, SOS suffers an empty feeling.

The passage pumps manfully away, but all it’s really got is a salade fatigué of clichés (swept to victory) and mixed metaphors (why would you get a catapult to reach the top – wherever that is – of someone’s dance card?).

(Check out the Google swept to victory page. Swept to Victory is the name of a horse!)

Anyway. Let’s put aside SOS‘s disappointment and focus on the larger notoriety of this essay, written by a transplanted urbanite who’s been teaching at the University of Iowa for a couple of decades. On the verge of the Iowa caucuses, he wants to acquaint ignorant ‘thesdans like SOS with his state, and his descriptions of life there have upset the locals. Many of them quote this sentence, for instance:

Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”

Sure that hurts. But what hurts more is how badly written this is. Note the (still-uncorrected) educated. Note again the besetting sin of this writer — the inability to edit himself. Do we need waiting to die? Waste-toids is great – why add meth addicts when you’ve already provided an exact description of them (pale skin, rotted teeth)? And Orphan Annie? Since you’ve said quixotic, why not stick with that? Man of La Mancha offers the same treacle. Choosing infantile Annie over noble Quixote is rather rubbing it in.

But really all you need in that last clause is this: who believe the sun’ll come out tomorrow. If you dump all the other shit – quixotically, Annie – the terse masterful sentence that results totally gets SOS in the mood. SOS likes a man of few words.

December 12th, 2011
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says…

… the more pretentious you are, the more words you’ll misuse.

Take the very pretentious Washington guy, Lanny Davis. He’s trying to say that he thinks it’s wrong to impute anti-semitic motives to people who disagree with you on Israel. This is what he says.

Impugning motives of people at the Center [for American Progress] and impugning [that] those motives are driven by anti-Semitism is, in my opinion, wrong.

The first use of impugning is okay, if mushy; impugning the motives would help a little. Imputing anti-semitic motives to people… would be much better.

The second use of impugning is incorrect. Implying would be correct. Implying that these motives are driven…

Pretentious people never speak or write clearly, being too grand for clarity.

December 9th, 2011
Bad Writing + Umbrage = Bad Outcome

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has told you and told you and told you that good writers have their prose and their emotions under control. Helen Vendler cites Yeats:

Yeats, in “The Fisherman,” thought a poem should be “cold/And passionate as the dawn” — that it should embody, along with the rising passion of inception, the cold inquisition of detached self-critique.

Passion and chill: You might say this about any good piece of writing, as in, most lately, this consideration of body radiation by Christopher Hitchens.

But I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.

Hitchens learned how to write from the master, George Orwell, here describing his own encounter with pain:

[T]he doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying [a] set of [cupping] glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

Do ye nae see that great writing – prose or poetry – is not the shriek, but the shriek mediated by consciousness? The mind at the same time registering and reflecting on experience? Compiling the metaphors and physical details that will generate in the reader the mood of the writer — the world of the writer? Not simply shrieking I HURT MAN but patiently, perceptively, gathering in the details of the material and social and psychological world in which consciousness moves?

I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe; the Bi-Pap breathing device in my nose is adjusted to a necessarily uncomfortable level of tightness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glasses are removed…and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

The late Tony Judt, describing the bondage of his last illness.

I could go on. But note in all of these great writers a sedate, almost stately, pace; an embroilment in the world around them rather than in their feelings; a stoical disposition that takes anguish for granted and sets about getting some leverage over it by thinking and writing about it…

One may be tired of the world — tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality — while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle — or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and the instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.

Yes, yes, I’ll stop. I wanted to toss Harold Brodkey into the mix. This was written days before he died.

*************************************

In the recent dust-up between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler over what good poetry is, we see what happens when you go with the shriek rather than the mediated shriek. In choosing poems with lines like

We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes. Stinking
Whores!…
Setting fire and death to
whities ass.

for the poetry anthology she’s edited, Dove prompts the question of poetic standards. In including this poem, she has given me access to an angry consciousness. Poems should be blades and fists with which to kill people; but they are also smears, which confuses me. The enemy is smears – red jelly, slime. To call the poem also a smear is to mix up the low sliminess of the enemy with your side’s high slashing quality. You’re hard; they’re soft. If you’re also a smear, the sides get mixed up.

This isn’t a surprising outcome, because when your writing is a spew, it’s likely to be a mess. Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man is equally rageful, but the writer chills the passion with his prose… which has the effect of making Ellison’s rage far more powerful and disclosing than Baraka’s. The very fact that Ellison has gone to the trouble of removing the rage from one singular consciousness, and placing it a larger, accessible world, makes his writing ramify out to an audience in a way Baraka’s simply cannot.

So this, Vendler points out, is a bad poem, and there are too many others like it in Dove’s anthology – flat, propositional, linguistically dull statements of rage and suffering and celebration and love.

“One wants the contemporary poets of Dove’s collection to ask more of their language, to embody more planes of existence,” writes Vendler; and this is because readers of poetry want the same “more capacious regard for the world” that everyone engaged in aesthetic experience wants, not an encounter with a singular shriek.

******************************

What about the umbrage in this post’s title?

That’s Dove’s, in her unfortunate response to Vender’s dislike of her anthology.

See, raw emotion doesn’t cut it. Writing is a cool medium, and if you can’t be cool, you make a hash of things.

December 7th, 2011
How to explain the American university to outsiders?

You can’t do better than a close read of this article, by an Indiana University student. Foreign observers from, say, former Communist countries will recognize the article’s rhetoric immediately.

Title: SHUT UP AND SHOW UP

The student is enraged because many of his fellow students do not share his passion for the basketball team. They are failing to put on their team jerseys and join the fervent throng. They are failing to understand what Indiana University means. Their absence at the games demoralizes their fellow students. If they continue to opt out of these mass rallies, they should be punished.

I’ve noticed an attitude change in IU students over the last five years or so. No longer are they dedicated fans by the masses, that will plan their schedule around the games. Fans that will always wear their IU gear with their head held high and be confident in their university.

Comrade Brezhnev has noticed a deterioration in the dedication of the masses to the cause.

I do want note, there is a solid core of passionate students but there are far too few of them. It looks like no more than a few hundred.

The radical core remain intact, to be sure! But there has been a serious falling away.

There has been an attitude change and I don’t like it. In a group of about 50 students polled, only about seven classified themselves as a diehard IU fan that will watch the team no matter their talent level. The worst part about this informal poll was that about ten claimed they rarely watch IU sports, yet they are a sports marketing major.

Those who reap the benefits of the revolution should make their fair contribution to it!

Too many times I’ve said at my fraternity house that I’m getting ready to work the game and they ask what game and who they are playing. Seriously? I cover every game and how could they not know when their university’s top sport plays? Maybe these students won’t buy in until Indiana wins consistently and against good teams. I think it should go the other way around.

The revolution has no need of fair-weather friends!

[Students] they don’t like the fact that their section is not the prime seating surrounding the basket. Instead of being grateful for the largest section in the country, nearly 7,600 seats, they believe that they are above alumni and donors. How irrational. There’s no way Indiana can take away seats from longtime donors and alumni that donate thousands each year to the university.

Our leaders have sacrificed for the party; they deserve a little special treatment.

If students aren’t dedicated and in attendance for the non-conference games, they don’t deserve to stand in the student section for the big games.

… [If] the students don’t show, cut the size of their section… [IU] is bringing in too many students out of state that just don’t get what Indiana basketball is all about. They don’t get the history, tradition or culture. They don’t understand you should show up early and heckle the opponents during warm-up.

Little as I wish to do this, I have decided that punishment is in order. Insufficiently committed comrades will stand for the big games. The so-called intellectuals on the admissions committee will be instructed to admit only those who understand our indigenous revolutionary traditions.

December 6th, 2011
Scathing Online Schoolmarm

A letter writer in the Washington Post takes issue with a Ruth Marcus column about Israel’s haredim.

No woman in Israel is “forced to board public buses from the back and stay there,” as Ruth Marcus stated. There are several bus lines, servicing overwhelmingly Haredi communities, where there is a voluntary separation of the sexes — the wish of female passengers no less than of males. If a woman chooses to flout that convention, she is protected by law.

Flout. SOS likes that flout. Synonyms for flout, we’re told, include

mock – scoff – jeer – deride – gibe – scorn – taunt

It’s interesting that this writer considers acting in accordance with your country’s laws (which forbid gender segregation in public places) to be an expression of contempt.

Nor is the flouter at all protected by the law. No one will intervene when the men on the bus spit at her and the women call her a whore. The haredim on the bus don’t do laws; they do conventions which, if disobeyed, are being flouted and will get punished.

Just as Marcus says, Israel is becoming a land of cults, not laws. It’s pretty remarkable that there are people in this country willing to justify this trend.

December 4th, 2011
Via UD’s Wonderful Reader, Shane…

… there’s this remarkable bit of writing on the subject of the American university.

The author glances at the latest sports scandals and writes

[This blogger] deplores the deplorable as much as anyone else, and only wishes readers could see how elegantly we wring our hands as each sad new story appears on our screens. Wring, wring, wring. Alas, alas, alas. Deplore, deplore, deplore. Repeat until Moral Seriousness is fully established.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm felt a frisson of sophistication reading this.

Allow her to reread it.

Yes. Again the frisson.

This writer has crouched down and taken a crap on Moral Seriousness. He has summited Mount Serious and crapped.

**********************************

SOS finds his debonair cynicism irresistable. The success of whatever argument he’s about to make about university sports is close to guaranteed.

The polemic announces itself in the title of his post: It All Begins with Football. The author argues that the very basis of our rich, globally dominant universities lies in the “tribal” appeal of their games, at which “shirtless boys” covered in warpaint whoop their way to abiding love of alma mater.

No naked tits, in other words, no money. Take away the tits and what’s a university? Buttoned up Mr Wizards, men incapable making the alumni cash register go DRRINGGGG.

***********************************

And you know, he’s right. Thinking back, SOS can date her decision to give money to Northwestern University to the first home football game there, at which she peeled off her sweatshirt and whipped them out.

November 21st, 2011
Adopt-a-Nazi

A neo-Nazi group will be allowed to participate in Delaware’s Adopt A HIghway program, but can’t use the word “Nazi” in the signs designating their segment of the roadway…

“[Their] request to have the words ‘Nazi Party’ displayed on a state sign was denied because DelDOT chose not to associate the state with the term and its generally understood philosophy of advocating the denial of civil rights,” DelDOT spokesman Geoff Sundstrom.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm read Mr Sundstrom’s description of Nazism to a randomly encountered man on the street (Mr UD, at the breakfast table). He laughed when she read it. She read it again. He laughed again. Why, asked SOS, did he laugh?

Mr UD put down his bright red coffee cup and looked away from his New York Times.

“Well… One normally expects a stronger statement about Nazis. It’s the bureaucratic care he brings to the subject…”

November 14th, 2011
Scathing Online Schoolmarm Reads a Porsche Review…

… in the Wall Street Journal.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote that it is only necessary for a man to think one thought all the way through to the end. If only Heidegger, an enthusiastic Nazi, had taken his own advice.

Still, the quote says something about the German intellectual temperament, inclined to grind away at a single complex idea profoundly and often beautifully, year after year. Kant, Beethoven, Einstein, Porsche.

The Stuttgart-based sports car company has been unpuzzling the 911 idea for decades, and just when you think the rear-engine sport coupe can’t get any better, it does. It also tends to get more expensive, so if you’ve been longing for a new 911, brace yourself. The Carrera S I drove around the Black Forest in late October had a base price of $97,350… Philosophy majors need not apply.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm thinks this would have had more impact if the author had not hidden behind Heidegger and had instead begun with something like

The German leader Adolph Hitler once wrote that he had no use for knights; he needed revolutionaries.

And then onto the thing about the German intellectual temperament, etc.

Also: SOS thinks the writer should have put the price of the car in his first paragraph. Maybe something like

Hitler’s ideas cost the world dearly, and the new Porsche Carrera S will definitely set its purchasers back too — to the tune of $97,530.

October 10th, 2011
Scathing Online Schoolmarm looks at a new book about laptops in the classroom.

This is how its author writes.

Two seismic forces beyond our control — the advent of Web. 2.0 and the inexorable influx of tech-savvy millennials on campus — are shaping what I call the new digital shoreline of higher education. These forces demand that we as educators reconsider the learning theories, pedagogies and practices on which we have depended.

The book, whose clunky mixed-up title I’ll let you discover at the link, wants us to know that it’s all good — all the twittering shit our students trail into class is all good. And even if it isn’t, it’s… what’d he say? It’s a seismic force, so you can’t do anything about it anyway sucker. It’s Nature, baby! Beyond our control! You think you can keep The Tumblr Temblor out of Classroom 25A Soltan Intro American Lit? It’s fucking inexorable! I’m not gonna argue the thing ’cause we all know it’s just a … a …. thing and you can’t do anything about things.

Nor can you do anything about pretentious writers. Look at this paragraph, with its pseudo-urgency and its self-importance (what I call) and its we as educators

Huh? Educators? What’s wrong with educators, SOS?

I dunno. I can only report the following. Every self-respecting professor I’ve ever known has at some point said to me something like: The worst dread I have about dying is that my obituary headline will call me an EDUCATOR. It’ll say LOCAL EDUCATOR DIES.

I mean, maybe they haven’t said something so strong. All have, however, expressed contempt for the word educator, and have shuddered at the thought of it being applied to them.

Is it because we’re cynical lazy shits who don’t truly educate? No. Au contraire. There’s something about the word. Again, I don’t really know. I only know it’s embarrassing. And it’s totally not surprising to find it here, in this empty pretentious paragraph, the guy patting himself on the back for being an educator.

And – you know – those teaching practices of the past… We haven’t just used them. No: We’ve depended on them. We’ve been in a co-dependent relationship with them, and we’re terrified of losing them to those uncontrollable seismic millennial things.

Mobile apps, content sharing and these tech-savvy students can become a professor’s best assets in the classroom, even if they sometimes seem threatening.

Threatening? It’s a fucking Phuket coming right at me! And there’s nothing I can do. I, Educator, have lost control of my classroom.

But here’s the good news:

These students are helping us — teachers at all levels — with new ways to communicate and they’re motivating us to truly see the potential of the vast, shared and co-created information resources that exist within interconnected nodes. We’re being challenged to rethink information creation, storage and delivery. They are time-slicers, shape-shifters, creators and mobile connectors. The playthings of our students’ youth are becoming the tools of their future.

I haven’t encountered language like this since my late lamented hippie youth. We are da yout! The last sentence is positively Cultural Revolution boilerplate: THE PLAYTHINGS OF OUR STUDENTS’ YOUTH ARE BECOMING THE TOOLS OF THEIR FUTURE. GLORIOUS FUTURE! DON’T BE SCARED, EDUCATOR! JOIN OUR YOUTH. TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE.

******************************

Send this guy a copy pronto.

September 24th, 2011
Scathing Online Schoolmarm takes a look at…

… an email a law professor sent to one of his or her students.

UD should say that there’s no sourcing on this email. The blog Above the Law doesn’t identify its origins – school, professor, student. But someone sent the email to the blog, and the blog wrote about it, and I’m going to assume that the incident and the email are for real.

Background: A tenured law professor at an American university said some things in class that a student found offensive. The student complained to the Dean of Students. The professor now writes to the student:

I got an email yesterday from the dean that a student in this class complained that I have not been letting you out of class promptly at 10:20 and that I made off-handed, non-PC references to Parkinson’s and ADD. First, let me say that I will try to be more aware of both these matters.

But seriously – did you really have to go to the dean to complain? Not that after 30 years of teaching it has any negative influence on my job approval or the dean’s appreciation for what I do but don’t you think you are old enough to fight your own battles? Don’t you think I am receptive enough to be addressed directly? Are you going to go to momma and poppa if a partner at a law firm treats you wrongly? Seriously??

SOS says: This email begins promisingly enough. The writer is straightforward, direct, non-pretentious. Non-PC is a bit on the defensive side, but let it go. The professor is good enough to try to be more aware, etc.

As with the press release from the nightclub (see the post directly below this one), the writer should have stopped here. Good writing is in part about getting out while the getting’s good. One way to think about this is: What exactly do you want to say to the person or group reading what you’ve written? What exactly? Otherwise, what do you want to get off your chest? Take out all of the chesty stuff. Write with your head voice, not your chest voice.

A professor might legitimately want to convey to a student the importance of fighting your own battles. But this – and, actually, everything else in this email – would have been better conveyed in person.

I mean, if the point of this email is that the student should deal as directly as possible with human conflict, why is the professor making matters worse by writing this down? If the professor wants to claim that he/she’s “receptive enough to be addressed directly,” why not extend that courtesy to the student, and simply talk to him/her after class or something? Inevitably, an email from a professor is going to be more intimidating than sitting down and chatting like a human being.

But the really big bad in this email, of course, happens here:

Not that after 30 years of teaching it has any negative influence on my job approval or the dean’s appreciation for what I do…

UD hates the word inappropriate. But this is so that. All the professor does here is betray his/her anxiety/grandiosity… I’d call it infantile…. A sort of nyah-nyah. Not exactly the sort of thing to reassure the student that this professor is receptive.

September 24th, 2011
Dates to be announced.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: The day after a university athlete is killed inside your apparently overcrowded nightclub, go ahead and write your own press release if you’d like. But before you release the release, have someone who knows how to write one read it over.

If you don’t, what you issue may be a rambling defensive statement rather than the terse acknowledgement of the event/pledge to work with the police that it should have been. It may include the strikingly bad proposal that the same club host a party in memory of the person killed there.

Come and support this young man and his life at the A-List Lounge, dates to be announced.

August 28th, 2011
A Pure Example of the Argumentative Technique Scathing Online Schoolmarm has Dubbed…

Going Cosmic.

Miami shouldn’t be given the death penalty, as Sports Illustrated argued again 15 years later. It’s big-time college athletics that should be.

The basic move is: We can’t do Local X until we totally solve Universal X.

It’s a fantastic deflection exercise, beloved of people who are always saying things like Better the evils we know.

August 17th, 2011
Scathing Online Schoolmarm has noticed…

… that only in sports writing are mixed metaphors considered okay. I mean, here’s the first paragraph of a New York Times piece about the latest Miami thing and about how nobody involved will be punished very severely because the people running the games are greedy amoral shits, etc.

As college sports officials confront yet another cheating scandal — this one involving Miami, the latest in a conga line of blue-chip programs that have recently stumbled into the crosshairs of N.C.A.A. investigators — speculation over the extent of the fallout intensified Wednesday.

A conga line made up of blue chips stumbles into crosshairs which emit fallout.

SOS doesn’t find this a very lucid sentence. Good writing is supposed to clarify, not to muddy. But never mind.

August 1st, 2011
Proper use of the…

colon.

July 1st, 2011
There’s an astringency, a clarity, a brilliancy…

… to highly specialized writing — writing that has one, and only one, quite narrow, interest. This sort of writing is the very definition of monoculture. It is the essence of one dimensionality, the pure beating heart of the provincial.

This writing is But is it Good for the Jews? writing.

And you gotta love it. Who wouldn’t want the thick, murky world distilled to one obsession? Everything in the vast globe understood in terms of one mania?

Here’s a good example of the form. A Forbes writer takes on the epidemic of mental illness and psychotropic drug taking in the United States today. But exclusively from the point of view of people who invest their money in pharma stocks.

Let’s take a look.

He begins with the nightmare story of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old killed with prescription drugs by her parents and the doctor who just kept throwing drugs at the family (her parents’ other two children were similarly medicated). The parents were both found guilty of murder. This murder, which riveted national attention to the depraved overprescription of powerful drugs in America, “may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks,” warns the Forbes columnist.

“[P]harmaceutical marketing executives are evidently undeterred by the law,” he goes on to note (they routinely market drugs for off-label use and routinely have to settle federal charges in the hundreds of millions of dollars — just the price of doing business for them). If they keep this up for much longer, and if nasty stories like the Riley thing keep making headlines, you might see a total ban on off-label use, and that would “cut into a major growth area for pharmaceutical companies.”

And what a growth area! “[T]he increase in diagnoses [of mental illness in America] is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers. The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.” Think of the investment possibilities here! Figure you can convince say twenty percent of the population that they and their children need lifelong powerful psychoactive drugs to function! I mean, there’s no physical basis for the diagnosis, so you can go to town! It’s a can’t lose proposition.

Unless! Unless party poopers like Marcia Angell keep making noise:

Dr. Angell links the astonishing rise in diagnoses of certain mental disorders to the huge financial stakes of physicians, pharmaceutical companies and SSI recipients.

Keep talking about this, the writer warns, and there could be a “public opinion backlash” that might affect your profit margin.

But — probably not. The writer concludes on a reassuring note. We’ll probably see increases in dependency on psychotropic drugs throughout the population, thank goodness.

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

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